Peer-reviewed article
Accelerating Well-being for Adolescents Through Transformative Public Policy: A Framework for Action.
Baird S, Das S, Luckenbill S, Oakley E, Banati P ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This paper develops a framework to improve how governments design and implement policies that benefit adolescents. The framework examines six key components: policy features and costs, implementation, participation, inclusion, appropriateness, and monitoring. The authors test their framework by analysing two real policies: Kenya's abolition of secondary school fees and Mexico's age of marriage law. They find that Kenya's school fees policy addressed most critical elements, while Mexico's marriage law had significant gaps, particularly in decentralized monitoring and involving adolescents in policy development.
Key points
- Six key policy components identified as critical for adolescent-focused policies: policy features and costs, implementation considerations, participatory approach, inclusion and coverage, policy appropriateness, and monitoring and evaluation
- Kenya's secondary school fees abolition policy addressed the majority of essential policy elements
- Mexico's age of marriage law had sparser coverage of essential policy elements
- Lack of decentralized monitoring identified as a potential driver of policy ineffectiveness
- Meaningful adolescent engagement at any level of policy development was lacking in both case studies
Limitations
The paper applies the framework to only two illustrative case studies and does not provide empirical data on policy outcomes for adolescents themselves. The framework's effectiveness in predicting or improving actual adolescent well-being outcomes remains untested beyond the illustrative examples.
Abstract
Purpose As governments around the world are shaping policy responses to advance adolescent well-being and protect their rights, the tools and resources to strengthen policy foundations, and ultimately improve their effectiveness, remain limited. This paper proposes a framework to support policy action with an explicit adolescent focus and applies it to two illustrative case studies to unpack the underlying policy conditions for success. Methods We develop an analytic framework with an adolescent lens that focuses on the full policy life-course, from development, to implementation, to evaluation. We then choose two illustrative case studies to apply this framework - 1) abolition of secondary school fees policy in Kenya and 2) age of marriage law in Mexico. These cases were chosen based on the existence of rigorous causal evidence of effect, alignment of salience with expert opinions, broad-based implications for adolescents across contexts, and varied levels of success at achieving intended outcomes. Results Our framework identified six key components as critical foundations for adolescent-focused policies: (1) policy features and costs, (2) implementation considerations, (3) participatory approach, (4) inclusion and coverage, (5) policy appropriateness, and (6) monitoring and evaluation, each with key adolescent-specific elements. We find that the majority of the essential policy elements are addressed in the school fees abolition policy (Kenya), but are sparser in the age of marriage law (Mexico). The results also highlight the lack of decentralized monitoring as well as meaningful adolescent engagement at any level of policy development as potential drivers of ineffectiveness of adolescent-centric policies. Discussion Our adolescent policy analysis framework can serve as an important tool to define principles in the development of effective adolescent policies. It also can serve as a useful evaluation tool to unpack the 'black box' of policy effectiveness when combined with robustly estimated effects.